Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (5 page)

R
oss and Jackson were alike that late winter of 1814 in that they were not yet figures of legend. Jackson was a Tennessee politico with a checkered reputation. Had his precarious health collapsed on March 15, his forty-seventh birthday, he would have been buried somewhere near John Wood without a single achievement that later generations would recall. Ross was hardly more than a youth, slim of both stature and achievement, probably known even within the Cherokee Nation mainly as a descendant of notable traders. Now the two men were about to begin their long engagement with history. To understand how the country changed during their time, it is useful to glimpse the United States as they found it.

In 1814 the American frontier, the farthest western point of consistent white settlement, was roughly where Jackson lived. It was Middle Tennessee. Farther west than that the Indian map was the governing map, and the map of the United States became more imaginary with every mile. In fact
Middle Tennessee formed a salient, a peninsula of settlement. Other parts of the frontier were not so far west. In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase extended the nation beyond the Mississippi, but except for a few cities such as New Orleans and St. Louis, the Purchase too was almost entirely the domain of Indians. Thus when Americans spoke of “the West” in Jackson’s day, they usually referred not to
Oregon or the Rockies, but to Nashville, or Lexington, Kentucky, or “the Ohio country.” That was the frontier.

This early version of the West was attracting migrants. The national population was exploding—from about four million in 1790 to more than seven million in 1810—and many were shifting westward. New roads and technology encouraged their movement. A traditional westward route led by horse or stagecoach over the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh, at the headwaters of the Ohio River, from which the Mississippi Valley became accessible by boat. It could take many weeks to float with the current to New Orleans, and it was challenging to return, but
in September 1811, associates of Robert Fulton completed a steamboat at Pittsburgh and sent it downriver and back again. Trade was increasing on many rivers, such as the Cumberland, on the banks of which Andrew Jackson for years operated a store offering supplies such as
butcher knives, cotton hoes, coffee, “Segars,” chocolate, brimstone, and pink ladies’ hats. The store was near the Hermitage, the farm he bought in 1804, which would remain his home and headquarters for the rest of his life. On the cash-poor frontier,
farmers often paid Jackson with cotton, which he shipped downriver toward New Orleans and the wider world.

Industry was growing as the nation spread. A census report in 1810 found that manufacturers were forging so much out of iron—wagon wheels, stoves, firearms, machinery, hammers, steam engines—that they were desperate for miners to produce more iron ore. Pennsylvania each year was making “
nine pounds of nails for each person in the state.” Since nails were used to fasten everything else, the production of seven million pounds of nails in a single year by a single state suggested the scale of construction and manufacturing. Southern states were expanding cotton production so rapidly that it would soon become “
the most considerable of our manufactures,” often woven into cloth on “family looms,” for the greatest of the New England textile mills had yet to be built. The cotton was grown largely on plantations run with slave labor. Slavery, though gradually disappearing in the North, was increasing in
importance below the Ohio. Many westbound settlers brought the slave economy with them. Some Indians adopted the practice of slave owning. White owners also complained that escaped slaves found refuge within Indian nations.

Farmers in every state produced distilled spirits—rye whiskey, corn whiskey, applejack, rum—a total of 25,804,792 gallons of hard liquor in a year:
more than three and a half gallons for every man, woman, and child. It was such a hard-drinking nation that the census report gently promoted the health benefits of beer, ale, and malt liquor, said to be more “moralizing” and “salubrious” than the hard stuff. Few people followed this advice, the report admitted. It was hard to find a “foaming” cold beer in the summer. Many a man, Andrew Jackson among them, found it “salubrious” instead to
mix a little gin with the water he was drinking. And when Jackson mortally wounded a man in a duel in 1806, there was only one thing to do for his antagonist as he lay dying: to comfort the man in his final hours,
Jackson sent a bottle of wine.

Some percentage of alcohol sales went to Indians. They were said to be especially susceptible to drink. Accounts of alcoholism among white men in that era suggest that natives may not have handled their liquor worse than anybody else. (The Choctaws noticed this, and when they imposed prohibition on themselves, they wryly noted in a public letter that “
ardent spirits have been banished from among us, and have been compelled to take up their abode among our civilized white neighbors.”) But there was no doubt that when Indians drank, it was a curse. Drunkenness led to violence and allowed white men to cheat Indians out of trade goods or land. The federal government banned the sale of alcohol on Indian territories, which merely caused natives to travel to the nearest white towns. The trade grew so pernicious that in 1808 President Thomas
Jefferson urged state governors to crack down on white sellers. The long-term effectiveness of his appeal can be measured by a French traveler’s account from 1825. Spending the night in a white settlement at the edge of the Creek Nation in Alabama, the traveler
found the town “
almost entirely inhabited” by “avaricious wretches” who had “assembled from all parts of the globe” to “poison the tribes with intoxicating liquors, and afterwards ruin them by duplicity and overreaching.”

General William Henry Harrison, the governor of the Indiana Territory in the early years of the century, noticed a difference between Indians in close contact with white people and those who were not. The man from a more distant tribe “
is generally well-clothed, healthy, and vigorous,” while an Indian nearby was more likely “half-naked, filthy, and enfeebled by intoxication.” The tribes closest to Harrison were “the most depraved wretches on earth.” Harrison’s awareness that Indians were suffering from their interaction with white society did not change his view of his duty. Rounding up some “depraved wretches,” he negotiated
treaties in 1804, 1805, and 1809, purchasing millions of acres of Indiana land at nominal prices.

These land cessions set off a chain of events that reverberated for years, eventually helping to spark Andrew Jackson’s military campaign in 1813–14. An eloquent and idealistic Shawnee, Tecumseh, used the injustice of Harrison’s 1809 treaty to build opposition to the white man’s land grabs. With his brother, said to be a prophet, he was uniting western tribes in a great confederation. He said the United States must never sign another treaty unless it was with all the tribes, for the land belonged in common to all. Harrison’s army drove off Tecumseh’s men in an early-morning battle at Tippecanoe, Indiana, in 1811, but Tecumseh missed the fight. He was off to the south, on a journey to find allies among the Creeks of the Mississippi Territory.

Tecumseh’s speeches, or talks as they were called, caused a sensation in the Creek Nation. The most prominent Creek leader, known as Big Warrior, warned his people that “
it was easier to begin a war than to end one.” But there were fault lines in the Creek Nation, caused by the federal policy of encouraging Indians to civilize. Some Creeks resisted adopting white culture, and their resistance meshed with
Tecumseh’s call to defend their ancient hunting grounds. Although Tecumseh failed to win the allegiance of the divided nation, he left the Creeks with a memorable prediction. As one Creek writer recalled, Tecumseh said he would “
ascend to the top of a mountain . . . and raise his foot and stamp it on the earth three times. By these actions he could make the whole earth tremble,” and all the nations of the earth would feel the power of his cause.

What happened next can be seen through the eyes of a very young witness. Margaret Eades Austill was probably under ten years old, but had an eye for detail that she wrote down years later. In 1811, the same year that Tecumseh made his disappointing visit to the Mississippi Territory, Miss Austill arrived. Her family had moved westward from Augusta, Georgia, in just the kind of migration that was beginning to transform the region. They joined two other families in a westward journey with “
about one hundred slave men, women and children,” including a servant named Hannah, who was “black or rather blue black, with clear blue eyes.” (If Margaret contemplated the sort of master-slave relationship that may have produced a woman with such a “peculiar appearance,” she did not mention it.) On the way to Mississippi, the families passed by Cherokees, who “were kind and friendly,” then entered domains that seemed more threatening. “As soon as we entered the Creek or Muskogee Nation, we could see the terrible hatred to the whites. . . . At night the wagons were all fixed around the encampment, the women and children and negroes in the center, the men keeping guard with the guns, so we made a formidable appearance of defense.” Indians trailed the wagon train as it lumbered across the landscape.

One night after a fearful day, the Indians had followed us for miles [and] we camped in an old field. Just as supper was announced, a most terrific earthquake took place, the horses all broke loose, the wagon chains jingled, and every face was pale with fear and terror. The Indians came in numbers around us looking frightened, and
grunting out their prayers, and oh, the night was spent in terror by all but the next day some of the Indians came to us and said it was Tecumseh stamping his foot for war.

It was the New Madrid earthquake of December 1811, which shook the whole Mississippi Valley and beyond with such force that the great river briefly flowed backward. Tecumseh had just received a divine endorsement.

When the war finally came in the summer of 1812, it would not end well for Tecumseh. After a stunning early success—he helped British troops capture the American fort at Detroit—he was killed by William Henry Harrison’s troops at the Battle of the Thames. But he had put a jolt into a faction of the Creeks, who rose in revolt, first against their nation’s leaders and then against white men. The traditionalists became known as the
Red Sticks, apparently because of the red war clubs held by their prophets. A Creek writer of the era said the traditionalists formed encampments where they conducted “
fanatical riots of shaving their heads and painting them red for distinction.” By July 1813 the Creek Nation was in a state of “
civil war,” according to John Ross. The Cherokee trader heard news of the trouble when traveling in the Mississippi Territory, and wrote a federal Indian agent with “intelligence” that “this present crisis is very serious,” and the whole Creek Nation could be conquered by “the Superior force of the rebels.” Some of the rebels were traveling
to Spanish-controlled Florida for gunpowder. Local white forces tried to intercept the gunpowder shipment, fighting an inconclusive battle that only seemed to increase the Red Sticks’ resolve.

By now the family of Margaret Eades Austill had made a homestead in the Mississippi Territory, north of Mobile Bay. “
One morning,” she recalled, “mother, sister and myself were alone except [for] the servants. Father had gone to the plantation when a man rode up to the gate and called to mother to fly for the Creek Indians had crossed the Alabama [River] and were killing the people. Mother said ‘where shall I fly
to, in God’s name?’” The man advised the family to retreat to a place called Carney’s Bluff, where settlers, “all hands, negroes and whites,” were building a makeshift fort.

When we arrived at the river it was a busy scene, men hard at work chopping and clearing a place for a Fort, women and children crying, no place to sit down, nothing to eat, all confusion and dismay, expecting every moment to be scalped and tomahawked . . . I went to mother and told her I was tired and sleepy she untied her apron and spread it down on the ground and told me to say my prayers and go to sleep. So I laid down but could not go to sleep the roots hurt me so badly. I told mother I had rather jump in the river [than] lie there. She replied “Perhaps it would be best for us all to jump in the river.”

Carney’s Bluff was not attacked, though the settlers were not wrong to worry. They were fortunate the Red Stick leaders were choosing a different target.

 • • • 

The Creek uprising was not Andrew Jackson’s business at first. He was occupied elsewhere on fool’s errands. When he first organized twenty-five hundred volunteers in the snow at Nashville in December 1812, they were placed at the disposal of the War Department in Washington for service wherever in the country they might be needed. It was presumed that their enemy would be British invaders, not Indians, and Jackson was ordered to move toward New Orleans in case a British fleet appeared at the mouth of the Mississippi. His little army made it as far as Natchez, Mississippi, before falling victim to the administrative chaos that characterized the war. He received orders from the War Department saying his force was no longer needed. He was told to disband his unit immediately, leaving the men to find their way home to Tennessee by themselves.

Inexplicable though the order was to Jackson, it fit a pattern: Americans were learning how to fight a war, and it showed. The United States had sent undersized and undertrained forces on grandiose missions, such as invading British Canada, with predictable results. A progression of disasters (with some heroic interruptions) would continue right up to August 1814, when British forces strolled into Washington and set the president’s house and the Capitol on fire. That Jackson would be ordered to disband his force in the middle of such a war was no worse than might be expected. Jackson’s response to this order proved him to be very much like the men he struggled to control, from Private John Wood to Adjutant John Ross: he would not follow an order that made no sense to him.
Considerably modifying his instructions, Jackson kept his unit together long enough to march them back to Tennessee. Only then did he send them to their homes, and even then he left an expectation that he might call on them again. It was said to be during this march that Jackson acquired the nickname Old Hickory, representing his toughness.